Mitchell Lyman joins John at the wheel of the Charles W. Morgan, Mystic Seaport, 1948. Photos¡courtesy Mitchell Ly man.
John Lyman: The Hub of Our Wheel By Karl Kortum
John Rowen Lyman (October 28, 1915 -November 17, 1977), a native of Berkeley, California, graduated from the University of California in 1936, and went to work for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla. Here he began to publish the first of many articles on maritime history, centering on West Coast shipping. In 1941 he joined the US Navy, serving during World War 11 at the Dahlgren Proving Ground in Virginia. He remained active in naval affairs, retiring from the reserve as captain in 1975. After the war he joined the Navy Hydrography Office and went on to lead programs in oceanography at the National Science Foundation, Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and Office of Naval Research. He earned his Ph.D. from Scripps in 1958. In 1968 he went to Chapel Hill to head up the Office of Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina, retiring in 1973 to pursue independent interests ranging from the history of flags, to sea chanties, to his untiring consultation and support of many efforts in maritime history. A founding trustee and later advisor to the National Society, he was also organizer and council member of the North American Society for Oceanic History. His death at the age of 62 is mourned by a wide circle offriends. The scope of his contribution to maritime history is suggested in this appreciation.
SEA HISTORY, FALL 1978
"The sun has fallen out of the sky," I said. "The sun has fallen out of the sky," agreed Lew Parker, sitting alongside my desk. That great scholar of the East Coast schooner happened to be in San Francisco in December of last year. We were talking about the death of John Lyman a couple of weeks before. Harold Huycke had called from Seattle in late November. He was desolated. Harold is a West Coast sailing ship scholar. He has idolized John Lyman since 1941. Lyman had invited him down from Santa Monica to a meeting of the Marine Research Society of San Diego that year on the Star of India; Harold was 18. "It was easy to hitchhike to San Diego. Passing through San Pedro I saw the Erskine M. Phelps moored up against the mudbank. That added atmosphere. And on the Star of India I met John Lyman . I was a young fellow getting interested in ships, particularly the old schooners and barkentines moored as fi shing barges in Santa Monica bay, and here I had landed smack-dab in the presence of the best West Coast maritime historian of them all. Instead of working my way up ... " Harold told me about Lyman at the time that plans for the San Francisco Maritime Museum were starting to come together. This was in 1948. I remember his awed tones. Lyman and I exchanged some letters about Kaiulani, which l had sailed in. I needed an article about her. John Lyman obliged with a piece that told me a great deal that I didn 't know about my old ship . All of it fascinating and all of it true. We had been writing
back and forth ever since. Andrew J. Nesd.all, sailing-ship savant of Waban, Massachusetts : " I have been having a correspondence with John Lyman (mostly one-way!) about the book On Many Seas . . . " What Andy means by "one-way" is that Lyman was doing most of the digging and supplying most of the answers as the two of them tried to decide the true identities of the ships mentioned in the book. "Spent some time in the Library of Congress yesterday and came up with the following ... " Lyman writes Nesdall. "John is a marvel at these things," writes Nesdall to me. Someone described nautical research as "crossing old sailors' yarns with customhouse records." Some of us collect old sailors' yarns, but we are spokes in the wheel. The hub-also referred to above as the sun in the sky-was John Lyman, who was so educated in the subject (and related subjects such as politics, social history, economics, maritime law and the oceans themselves) that he saw in our fragments the parts of a system. The system might be a particular voyage, or the economics of the down-Easter, or the rise of iron-hulled vessels vis-a-vis wood, or the merits of Hu mboldt pine over Douglas fir for shipbuilding, or the largest two-masted schooner ever built, or the effect of Hawaiian politics on ship registration, or the effect of tonnage laws on ship designs, or the effect on the intercoastal trade of wind systems at different times of the year. 1 sk im the surface. As to so urces, Lyman said: "Few people not connected with shipping realize 13